


The Next Step

by DrusillaStanden



Series: Sam and Laura [5]
Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett, Laura and Sam, Venetia - Georgette Heyer
Genre: Book change!, Book travel, F/F, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-26
Updated: 2018-12-26
Packaged: 2019-09-28 05:34:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,956
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17176868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DrusillaStanden/pseuds/DrusillaStanden
Summary: This is the next part in the Laura and Sam series. They're just finishing up in Venetia and on their way to...somewhere else. Merry Christmas!





	The Next Step

**Author's Note:**

  * For [carocactus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/carocactus/gifts).



‘Where to next?’

Sam’s question hung in the air of the kitchen, sitting comfortingly alongside the smell of coffee. Laura’s face was pensive as her hands were busy. As she gathered the accoutrements of the coffee service, she cast a look at the pile of dishes still to be washed. Her eyes narrowed before the smile returned to her face.

‘Not today!’ She turned to Sam, resting her hip against the kitchen table.

‘Well…’

They were interrupted as Marston thrust his head through the door and seeing Sam still in the kitchen, laundry key in hand, he let out something perilously close to a shriek. His hands went up to his hair, tugging at it in a gesture Laura and Sam had thought confined to the pages of a book. But then again, that’s exactly where they were.

‘What are you doing, you useless girls! MAKE THE BEDROOM UP! Is the coffee made?’ He spat questions at them, his speech rapid and his pitch increasingly high. When Laura shook her head, he didn’t even give her time to speak. ‘Well, hurry up!’ he cried before disappearing again, speeding backwards through the door.

Sam and Laura exchanged glances.

‘It’ll hold,’ said Sam. ‘He needs to sober up first. We’ve time to decide. I’ll go make up the room.’

‘I’ll sort out a warming pan.’

‘You think of everything,’ Sam smiled.

‘One of us has to!’ said Laura with a smirk. ‘I’m not doing this washing up though. I’m not doing washing up that’s going to be … book-magicked away anyway,’ she said belligerently.

Sam let out a choked laugh, leaned over to give Laura a peck on the cheek and strode out of the room.

She was back in little more than 20 minutes and found Laura sat at the table, coffee gone and glaring at the pile of plates and dishes. It had grown. Marston had obviously brought in new offerings from the decimated dining room.

‘Marston told me to send you to the dining room as soon as you were done. He’ll be wanting you to take her to her room. I’ll go up and warm the bed. You’ll be alright?’ Laura’s lips quirked in something like worry.

‘Yeah, don’t worry. He’s head-over-heels focused on her right now. I’ll bring her up in a minute and then we’ll have to be ready. I wonder where Mark is. I think he’ll be glad to see the back of us. He was very pointed about his alternative plans!’

‘Yeah, I’m sure he’ll have his eye on a much more isolated library next time! No idea where he is now.’ She shrugged, ‘Go on with you. I think poor Marston’ll be having a conniption if we make him wait any more minutes.’ She pushed Sam towards the door.

‘Poor Marston,’ Sam tossed over her shoulder.

‘Poor Ribble,’ replied Laura with a fake shudder.

‘Fair.’ With that, Sam bustled out of the room. Marston had Venetia waiting in the library and Sam got to see her in the flesh for the first time. She was a tall young woman, with a sparkle of determination in her eyes.

She was ushered in by Marston. With a bow, he informed Venetia that she would be led to her room and Sam looked up subserviently, ‘Ma’am, if you’ll come this way…’ Venetia nodded in response and followed her from the room to the yellow chamber where Laura waited.

‘Would you like anything ma’am. Can we help you change from the road?’ asked Sam, her eyes bowed to the floor. There were certainly disadvantages to entering the novels of your youth as a servant and not an equal. All your heroines were all too obviously classes above you.

Venetia asked for assistance in changing her outer clothes but seemed anxious to be rid of them, keyed up and little wishing for any human interaction. Within a few minutes, they were both dismissed. As they were backing out of the room, a clear, well-modulated voice stopped them.

‘Are you Samantha and Laura?’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ replied Sam, her face blank. The perfect servant, she thought somewhat grimly. Laura’s hand pressed into the small of back, a small sign of support or of tension; she wasn’t sure.

‘My brother mentioned you. It was most unusual for him to…’ She shook her head slightly, starting again. ‘As he tells it you are remarkable young women.’

To her mortification, Sam blushed. ‘Ma’am.’

‘Yes. Well.’ Venetia lowered her voice, but it was filled with warmth as she waited and met both their eyes. ‘Thank you. For both of them. Thank you.’ She paused before tentatively focusing on the space between them. ‘If you weren’t raised to this life, you must have given a lot up. Was it worth it?’

It was Laura who replied. ‘Ma’am. _You_ are a remarkable young woman. You are brave and strong and your decisions are your own. But yes, if it matters, for me, it was worth it.’

‘There is far more to this world, you know that. Don’t doubt it now.’ Sam answered firmly. ‘A good friend is hard to find. It is worth it.’ Sam raised Laura’s hands to her lips, swiftly but deliberately, before bowing slightly.

‘Oh,’ came Venetia’s reply in a small surprised sigh. Sam turned and tugged Laura through the door before closing it behind her.

‘What was that?’ said Laura as Sam, still holding her by the hand, continued down the corridor.

‘It’s just…’ Sam broke off, struggling to find the words. ‘This world ends soon and there’s no risk to it. I wish I could give you more. I hate that I have to hide it and I just wanted…I don’t know, to show this world that I’m not ashamed of us even if we’re hiding…and I just wanted you to know that you are beloved and beyond value… I don’t know. It’s nothing but stupid probably.’

Laura squeezed her hand and smiled, ‘Idiotic.’

Sam laughed, shaking off her uncertainty. ‘Well, we have decisions to make. It was between 20th century England, the 500 kingdoms or 18th century France if I remember…’

‘Ladies,’ came a voice from behind them. They both jumped (although they wouldn’t admit it if asked.) They made a quick recover, looks of bland innocence descending across their faces.

‘Hello, Sir.’

‘None of that ‘Sir’ stuff. Aubrey. Sir is so lowering. It makes me feel like my brother and really… there’s only so much a man can bear.’

They were both struck at the informality.

‘Come, come. I feel like the time for deceptions is passing. You appear to be planning for a journey,’ he said jestingly, his eyebrows raised.

‘Oh no,’ said Sam with an insouciant half-laugh, ‘We’re just deciding what novel to read next.’

‘In 20th century England? There is no such text.’ He stopped, his gaze faltering for a second. ‘If you’re leaving, I want to leave with you.’

Sam and Laura exchanged a glance. ‘I don’t believe you can travel where we are going, S..Aubrey,’ replied Laura.

Aubrey gestured them on. ‘Don’t let me stop you. Were you going to the kitchen? I rather fancy a midnight snack…’

Sam and Laura walked ahead in silence, thoughts racing. When they got to the kitchen, he gestured them to the seats around the table still bearing the traces of the earlier meal. With forced unconsciousness, he carved himself some slices of ham and a hunk of bread before sitting opposite them.

Sam made to speak but he held up a hand. ‘Look, I don’t… I don’t understand who you are but I know that you are not from here. Not this place. Not this time.’ He held up a hand. ‘Don’t waste your breath denying it. There have been plenty of clues. I’m not a child or an idiot,’ his voice was threaded with frustration and with something akin to desperation. Sam and Laura simply didn’t know how to reply. ‘I want to go with you, if you can take me. I want to understand, at the least.’ He paused and continued almost inaudibly. ‘Even if I’m left here.’

Sam’s hand covered Laura’s, she turned to her. Softly, she prompted, ‘It can’t hurt. Not now.’ Turning back to Aubrey, she told him. Laura made occasional interjections to soften the blows that Sam hadn’t seen landing or tell a harsher truth than Sam would commit to. They told him that his world was the inside of a book. That it lasted for only a few more hours. That he would end his own world. That they could leave. That there were a million and more worlds to join for them. That some were recognisable. That some were strange and new. That they didn’t belong to any of these worlds so they could travel through them. That he belonged to this world… That his life, this section of his life, would simply repeat until every copy of the book was destroyed and perhaps not even then… That he would forget. That it would be like they had never been. That he wouldn’t mind…because he wouldn’t know.

Aubrey throughout chewed meditatively on his ham and bread. As they spoke, his eyes had clouded with suspicion but they had pointed to the corners of the room. The lines were blurring at the edges of the book’s world as it came to its close. And his sight was clear enough to see it. As they continued, his eyes dimmed with tears. And then, they began to sparkle with fervour and with excitement.

‘I don’t think you can leave,’ repeated Laura at the end of the recital as his expression remained buoyant.

‘But perhaps I can,’ he said, undeterred. ‘And even if I can’t…what a wonder the world is. I’m glad to just…know.’ He leant forward intently. ‘Tell me, tell me how you see beyond this world. Let me see if I can do it too.’

And so, they told him what they had been told and he tried, and he tried, and after seemingly endless attempts, he said that he could see something else. He couldn’t tell them what. Sam and Laura exchanged glances that were half sad and half-embarrassed.

‘We need to choose a path and desire a destiny… That’s how Mark phrased it. Just we need to pick a book and a role. We had it narrowed down…’ Laura began before she was interrupted by Sam.

‘But in order to leave you need to finish the book.’

‘What?’ asked Aubrey, mystified.

‘ _You_ finish the book. You have to go find your sister and Damerel and … well, it’s supposed to be a surprise.’

‘They finally untangle the knotted skein do they?’ he asked absent-mindedly.

‘Well,’ said Sam, ‘Your sister came up with a somewhat Gordian Knot-esque solution.’

He snorted. ‘That sounds like Venetia,’ he paused, ‘Well, I think they’ll be happy or they would be…’ his voice trailed off.

Laura rallied him with her tone, ‘There’s no time like the present. We’ll come upstairs with you and choose the destination. Any preferences?’

‘No,’ said Aubrey wonderingly.

‘Well, we’ll have a few minutes after you leave the scene…we can decide then.’ She stood up decisively and began to move round the table. ‘Come on,’ she said and held out her hand to Aubrey. He looked at it blankly. She tugged at his wrist. ‘Come on!’ And they were leaving.

‘They’re in the study,’ said Sam helpfully. She was the only one who’d read it. They almost pushed Aubrey through the door.

‘Well,’ said Sam after a pause. ‘If that isn’t one of the most tragic things, I’ve ever lived through… God dammit.’

‘He might be able to leave.’

‘I don’t think so though. Do you?’ Sam looked at Laura hopefully but Laura, after a moment’s thought, shook her head. ‘No. But he won’t know. It feels like it makes it worse. He loves…knowing and this feels like condemning him to ignorance again and again ad nauseum, ad infinitum… but he won’t mind. He won’t know…’ her voice trailed off.

‘Well, either way, we need to decide where we’re going. Somewhere Aubrey-friendly, just in case?’

‘We should check,’ said Laura thoughtfully. ‘Check our options once again.’ And so they concentrated, as they had just taught Aubrey to do. Their minds and eyes focusing on the beyond, where their book sat and where they were just words on a page…

‘Oh shit,’ said Sam as Laura blew out air in shock.

They pulled back into this world and shared a panicked glance. The books had been moved. Their best guess was their book had gone on holiday with the owner or been lent out but they currently sat on a shelf with only two other books in a close radius. _The Whisperer in the Dark_ by Lovecraft or _The Hogfather_ by Terry Pratchett. As they were frantically recalibrating their thoughts, Aubrey stepped through the door.

‘They were…happy,’ he said, his tone somewhere between sorrow and joy. He shook his mood off like water and turned to Laura. ‘So, where are we going?’ He noticed the expressions on their faces. ‘What? Is something wrong?’

‘Well,’ said Laura, seeing Sam’s inability to form an explanation. ‘We have less choices than expected but… it’s not really a choice, is it Sam? I mean, I don’t want to go anywhere near a Lovecraft.’

‘No!’ Sam returned decisively. She shot out a hand and grabbed Laura’s shoulder. ‘God, I hope he got out already.’

‘Mark?’ asked Laura.

‘Yes. I mean maybe he’ll be alright in the library…’ she said tensely.

‘Let’s hope so,’ said Laura. ‘Have you read it?’ She asked. ‘What are the options…?’

‘We don’t have time,’ said Sam, panic coating her voice. ‘Look!’ Laura looked and saw that the walls appeared to all intents and purposes to be melting. Aubrey was looking around him in a disconcerted fashion. Perhaps he could see… Sam grabbed his arm and shook it slightly to get his attention. ‘Aubrey, listen, we’re going into a book called _The Hogfather,_ don’t ask any questions, no time. There’s a university there. _Want_ to go the university. Desire it. Alright?’

‘Yes,’ he replied, half bamboozled.

‘You’ve read it Laura?’

‘Yes.’

‘Right, we probably want to be…’ Before Sam had time to finish, their reality receded from them. They were words and they were people and they were a thousand possibilities all at the same time and it was terrifying and seductively comforting at once. Their minds were desperately fixed on their next target, their hands reached out frantically for the others but they were tugged away by streams of reality and unreality which battered them like the warm waves of a loving and betraying sea. And then…Sam found herself on the floor of a narrow bedroom. There was an empty bottle of what could putatively be called wine lying on the floor beside her and she realised with horror that her current incarnation was heavily hungover. She tried to sit up and winced as the sunlight hit her eyes.[1] There was a banging on the door which echoed through her head like a tribe of enraged elephants dancing in a pit of poisonous snakes.[2] When the noise didn’t go away, and the part of her that wasn’t her but was her now, recognised the knock, she got tentatively to her feet and staggered her way down the stairs to the door of the lodging house. The hand that had been raised to knock again almost hit her in the face as she flung back the door, her eyes dancing in their sockets, her stomach fighting a war with gravity that it threatened to win spectacularly and her ears ringing with the knock that never came.

‘Erm, Miss Samantha,’ said the somewhat nervous young man in front of her. ‘You’re late with the teeth. I’m a whole thirty minutes off my run today.’

‘Ernie,’ said two voices in her head at the same time.

‘Can you get the teeth?’ he enunciated clearly and Sam winced. He muttered under his breath, ‘Off her head again. Bloody ‘ell.’ He made sure to keep his tone well out of hearing range though.

Sam turned and contemplated the stairs, longing for death and deciding between taking part in the story, or spending the day simply shaking off the headache. ‘Not very sporting,’ the part of her that was her said and to hammer the point home, ‘You don’t know where Laura is. Easy to get yourself in a pickle in this world…’ ‘Fine!’ she answered herself[3] before stomping upstairs. After a minimal search, she came up with a packet of teeth (eew) and she returned back downstairs, handing them over truculently.

Ernie turned to leave before Sam’s arm shot out and caught him.

‘Oy,’ he cried out before the fierce look on her face suggested that silence was a better and more successful option.

‘Look, Ernie,’ she said, conflicted. She knew how the story went but…it didn’t seem right not to warn him. ‘There’ll be a bloke today, one eye, well-creepy. Looks like he’d stab you as soon as look at you. He would. Just…be careful, alright? Try not to stop the cart.’

‘Alright,’ said Ernie, desperately trying to disengage himself from the drunk fairy gripping his arm and drooling on him while uttering preposterous nonsense about a one-eyed monster. He patted her on the arm. ‘You go to bed now, Miss Samantha, a busy night ahead!’ he said, with forced cheer.

It wasn’t much later that he wished he’d listened a little harder. As Mr Teatime looked him in the eye, his voice calm and his gaze equally calmly murderous, Ernie felt pretty sure he was going to die today.

‘One of the fairies told me I’d meet you,’ he blurted out, fear making him say things he just knew were suicidally stupid.

Mr Teatime smiled the smile of a cat who’s just found a particularly lame sparrow fluttering by the garden door. ‘Oh, and, between friends, Ernie, who was this fairy?’

Ernie gulped. His brain was telling him that giving Mr Teatime the name would only mean very bad things for Miss Samantha but it was also telling him that not giving Mr Teatime the name would mean very bad things for himself and in the very near future. He told Mr Teatime. And Mr Teatime made sure on the way through town to pay a quick visit to the assassin’s guild where he went to find a lesser assassin for a lesser job. You have to know how to delegate.

Sam, meanwhile, had gone back to bed and the dusk was well and truly fallen[4] when she heard the almost imperceptible rustle at the window. Before she knew it, she was pinned to the bed with a knife at her throat. Her eyes shot open and she saw Laura above her, dressed in black and with an incredibly conflicted look on her face. Her eyes were closed and her mouth compressed firmly. It opened slightly now and Sam could just about hear what she was mumbling rapidly to herself. ‘It’s not real. It’s not real. It’s not real…’ The grip slackened a little, the tone growing more desperate. ‘But I can’t, I can’t.’ Sam gasped and her own recognition sparked Laura’s, whose eyes shot open and focused on her before she cried out ‘Sam!’, placing the knife on the table and leaning down for a brief hug. ‘Thank God!’

There was a moment of silence.

‘You’re an assassin?’

‘Yeah…’ she said, her eyes skittering away from Sam’s gaze. ‘It looks like I might still have been having some murderous thoughts when we left. A little too high on the ‘kicking him in the balls’ thing…’ She quirked her mouth to the side for a second, shame-facedly.

‘And you’ve been sent to kill me?’ said Sam, in a voice of long-suffering exasperation.

‘Well…yeah,’ said Laura, her mouth quirking to the side again in a mixture of embarrassment, shame and humour.

‘Well…’ said Sam contemplatively. ‘Fuck me sideways!’

Laura had relaxed her position when she dropped the knife but she lent forward now with a roguish smile and her hands grasped Sam’s wrist pushing them into the bed behind her head. ‘Well…I’m not sure about the sideways…’

Sam rolled her eyes. ‘Oh my God, woman! Not content with being an assassin… You’re trying to seduce me with terrible word play.’

‘Well, you know, waste not, want not! I mean… really, you gave me such an in there.’ She wiggled her eyebrows suggestively, while loosing her hold.

Sam shook a hand free, reached up and flicked the end of her nose. ‘Well, missy, we’ve got a great deal to do here. You’re joining me on the right side, we’re going to do some saving of the world and… oh shit, we should probably find Aubrey and make sure they don’t blow him up or poison him or something. I’m pretty sure he came with us. I wonder where he is.’

As it happened, Aubrey was at the moment gazing in continued perplexity at Hex. He seemed to be a wizard (which he rather liked) with a mixed array of arcane and useless knowledge (it was the easiest learning he’d ever done) and a sudden intense interest in plum pudding. He’d thought at first that he’d wound up in an asylum but then he’d met Ponder Stibbons and he’d realised that the rest were mostly mad but they were purposefully mad and that looked at the right way, this was an institute of learning. He’d liked Ponder Stibbons on sight. He had ignored Aubrey as he went past mumbling a mix of perfectly sensible questions[5] and mathematical formula and Aubrey had been drawn to him as a member of the thieves guild to a shiny Gold watch hanging from a low pocket with a sign reading ‘steal me’ written on it. He’d followed him to a room with a great machine in it which he couldn’t understand at all but Stibbons had liked questions and Aubrey always had a thousand. And so here he was. But he still couldn’t understand the cheese.

 

[1] And hit felt like an appropriate description. To be exact, it felt like the light beams were made of tiny hammers, each one intent on drilling right through to the back of her eyeballs. The current vortex of belief, ensured that this is exactly what was happening.

[2] This happens far more often than you’d think. The journals of the intrepid traveller Twoflower record at least 3 instances of the above. The third, however, was, as far as Twoflower understood, part of a complex show of dominance between two rival elephant clans and should therefore not be considered a natural occurrence.

[3] Talking to oneself is often seen as the first sign of madness but, as the philosopher Quirmothon noted, talking to yourself if merely a sign of recognising your own temporal existence and your recognition of the duality of self, recognised by all great religions: the division between your old self and the current one that realises that everything you did in the past was probably a terrible mistake that you may need to be reminded several hundred times not to repeat and that your old self was bloody stupid.

[4] Like a soggy bag full of wet cement

[5] Well, they were coherent questions as well. If Aubrey didn’t see the connection between cheese and ants that clearly, the framing of the question implied both grammatical sense and some sort of context of which he was as yet unaware.

**Author's Note:**

> Comment away!


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